Why Are We Yelling? summary

Climate change, vaccination, gun control; in 2019, discussion around hot-button topics like these feels increasingly polarized. In public discourse and in private disagreements, the middle ground is in short supply. The culprit? Cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when you encounter a belief or behavior that contradicts your own perspective. The further the conflicting perspective is from your own, the greater the cognitive dissonance, and the anxiety you’re likely to feel as a result. That’s when, in an effort to assuage this anxiety, the voices in your head get to work. Broadly speaking, there are four types of voices that kick in during conflict. Let’s look at the highly polarized debate around vaccinations as an example. 

Imagine you’re at the counter of a gelato shop. You choose chocolate over pistachio, and it tastes delicious. Good call!

Now, you’ve never liked pistachio gelato, so were you biased against it when you made your decision? Yes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Biases can be useful, helping us conserve our decision-making energy and deal with overwhelming amounts of information. So instead of being paralyzed by the choice between pistachio, chocolate, or one of the many other flavors, you end up with a gelato you really like.

When it comes to our careers, we’re often told to “play to our strengths.'' Well, the same advice applies to the way we approach our disagreements. When we’re arguing, one of our strengths is the way we inhabit and understand our own perspective. 

Speculating about our opponent’s perspective, on the other hand, is a weakness. When trying to understand our opponent’s arguments, we have an unfortunate tendency to oversimplify or even demonize their point of view.

Have you ever played Battleship? You and your partner each arrange toy battleships on a grid. You can’t see your partner’s grid and they can’t see yours. The aim of the game is to ask questions that will reveal where your partner’s ships are located. 

What do you do when you find their ships? Simple – you sink them.

Do you want to win a debate? It’s easy enough to do, with a strategy known as nutpicking. Find the person on the opposing team who has the nuttiest, silliest arguments and then demolish those arguments one by one. Done and dusted!

But when you win an argument in this manner, you’re really losing opportunities for personal growth and interpersonal connection. In short, by nutpicking, you’re squandering the opportunity to have productive disagreement.

Think back to your last disagreement. Instead of focusing on the content of the disagreement, try focusing on the space where it took place. Was it inside or outside? In public or in private? Online or offline? Did you feel safe expressing yourself? Do you think others felt safe expressing themselves? 

Disagreements don’t take place in vacuums. The spaces where our disagreements occur can seriously influence their outcomes. Imagine a discussion that takes place in a classroom. It’s face to face. There are set classroom rules that all discussion participants abide by, and there’s a teacher present to arbitrate and adjudicate debate. 

It’s easy to have productive disagreement when the disagreement in question occurs over something benign, like which restaurant to pick for dinner. It’s less easy, but ultimately rewarding, to engage in productive disagreement over more critical issues, like politics. But when it comes to hot-button issues like euthanasia and gun control, productive disagreement can mean engaging with ideas and positions that we find truly abhorrent. How do we productively engage with ideas that strike us as dangerous or repellent? 

When we meet a repellent idea, our first impulse is to shut the discourse down with the voice of avoidance. We don’t want to get involved in debate. We feel it’s irresponsible to give these ideas airtime. We would prefer to pretend that the people who hold these views didn’t exist.